Obviously Twitter’s search operators are little different than Google’s because they can include things like hashtags, but they’re close.

How to dominate Twitter Search

Let’s say you’ve got a real estate client.

Maybe your client is on the lookout for folks dealing with a home inspection. No one gets a home inspection unless they’re buying a house.

Here’s how you can search Twitter to find those people:

“home inspection” near:”Boston, MA” -.co -.com -.org -.net -.us -.ca

“home inspection”

Put the search term in quotes so you get exact match. Adjust this as necessary to account for typos and other variations.

near:”Boston, MA”

This one is huge. Take advantage of Twitter’s geo-targeting. Google can’t do this, so it’s one huge advantage of searching Twitter. You can even set a radius by adding within:50mi to your search (or 10mi, 20mi, etc).

-.co -.com -.org -.net -.us -.ca

Strip out people sharing links. There’s a good chance that if Joe and Mary Jonesington are scheduling a home inspection, they’re not linking to their blog to do it. Anyone tweeting home inspection links is probably a vendor.

The Results

Submit that search query and you’ll instantly see a list of people who are talking about your client’s industry. Obviously you’ll have to change this to fit your industry.

Here’s what the list of results looks like:

You can even look for unhappy customers.

Add emotion operators to the query, like :) and :(, and Twitter will algorithmically show you tweets that have the appropriate tone.

Imagine how powerful that is!

You can find people who:

Are within 20 miles of you

Are talking about your industry

Are unhappy about something in your industry

Are tech savvy enough to voice their opinion on Twitter

That’s an absolute goldmine for potential leads and business connections.

Twitter search people by location

You want customers. Customer are people. You need to search for people.

All the blogs and writeups out there talk about using Twitter search for natural language or to “join the conversation.”

And that’s great.

But look at Google’s LSI searches:

See the patterns in there?

Twitter search people

Twitter search friends

Twitter user search

Twitter search people by location

People are searching on Google for information on how to search on Twitter to find people.